My -already low- confidence in hosted solutions in general has recieved another dent. After all the Lulz from LulzSec, the breakins in- and fskups of services like dropbox, this was the final one. I know, mt.Gox is nothing compared to large corporation and professional startups. But it proves my personal experience (I am a webdeveloper) that the average online project is simply broken, buggy and poor in security. One would expect such startups to have a proper security model, including cirquit-breakers, fallbacks and secondline defences in place. Apparantly not. Or not enough.

As such, I will put more effort in the various projects out there that redistribute the web: decentralisation is the only proper solution for all the failing central points.

Mt.Gox is a central hub in a decentralized system. Making nearly the entire bitcoin economy dependent on one, single point of failure.

BitCoin is for me, one of the solutions, trough such decentralisation. Other -unrelated- are decentralisation of our messaging (twitter) and our social connections (facebook). We are rapidly centralising the entire internet. Which makes it unstable and vulnarable. Lets use BitCoin as a means to get a decentralised movement going and giving it even more momentum.

TL:DR: Mt.Gox was a single point of failure. We should have decentralised systems to avoid this dependency and instability.

I'm spreading it around now, Tradehill and Bitcoin7 because Mt. Gox still isn't really up and running. I got in on both via referral codes which was nice, but who knows how long those things will last. It's nice to have alternatives though, and BTC's are trading the cheapest on Bitcoin7 right now, referral codes in my sig.

If you're looking to sign up for an exchange try Bitcoin7 or Tradehill, referral codes are listed below. Sign up for Tradehill and get 10% off of every trade you ever make.

My -already low- confidence in hosted solutions in general has recieved another dent. After all the Lulz from LulzSec, the breakins in- and fskups of services like dropbox, this was the final one. I know, mt.Gox is nothing compared to large corporation and professional startups. But it proves my personal experience (I am a webdeveloper) that the average online project is simply broken, buggy and poor in security. One would expect such startups to have a proper security model, including cirquit-breakers, fallbacks and secondline defences in place. Apparantly not. Or not enough.

As such, I will put more effort in the various projects out there that redistribute the web: decentralisation is the only proper solution for all the failing central points.

Mt.Gox is a central hub in a decentralized system. Making nearly the entire bitcoin economy dependent on one, single point of failure.

BitCoin is for me, one of the solutions, trough such decentralisation. Other -unrelated- are decentralisation of our messaging (twitter) and our social connections (facebook). We are rapidly centralising the entire internet. Which makes it unstable and vulnarable. Lets use BitCoin as a means to get a decentralised movement going and giving it even more momentum.

TL:DR: Mt.Gox was a single point of failure. We should have decentralised systems to avoid this dependency and instability.

+1

P2P prediction markets is where it's at. This will allow people to coordinate exchange rates as a special case. Actual exchange of fiat for btc can then be done by any two parties using the market price, and using it to hedge if necessary.

My -already low- confidence in hosted solutions in general has recieved another dent. After all the Lulz from LulzSec, the breakins in- and fskups of services like dropbox, this was the final one. I know, mt.Gox is nothing compared to large corporation and professional startups. But it proves my personal experience (I am a webdeveloper) that the average online project is simply broken, buggy and poor in security. One would expect such startups to have a proper security model, including cirquit-breakers, fallbacks and secondline defences in place. Apparantly not. Or not enough.

As such, I will put more effort in the various projects out there that redistribute the web: decentralisation is the only proper solution for all the failing central points.

Mt.Gox is a central hub in a decentralized system. Making nearly the entire bitcoin economy dependent on one, single point of failure.

BitCoin is for me, one of the solutions, trough such decentralisation. Other -unrelated- are decentralisation of our messaging (twitter) and our social connections (facebook). We are rapidly centralising the entire internet. Which makes it unstable and vulnarable. Lets use BitCoin as a means to get a decentralised movement going and giving it even more momentum.

TL:DR: Mt.Gox was a single point of failure. We should have decentralised systems to avoid this dependency and instability.

+1

P2P prediction markets is where it's at. This will allow people to coordinate exchange rates as a special case. Actual exchange of fiat for btc can then be done by any two parties using the market price, and using it to hedge if necessary.

Agreed, it makes things to much easier, we just need greater acceptance and use. Bitcoin is still in it's infancy, and the market is at an all time high in interest and users, and it will only continue to grow.

If you're looking to sign up for an exchange try Bitcoin7 or Tradehill, referral codes are listed below. Sign up for Tradehill and get 10% off of every trade you ever make.

Confused. I'm new to all this and I have no idea who to trust to convert my hard earned £ into bitcoins

If all you want to do is convert and not trade regularly, you have pretty much nothing to fear. Transfer funds into Mt. Gox or TradeHill, purchase your bitcoins, and withdraw them to a bitcoin address. Problem solved.

Make sure it's a secure wallet that you put them in though, if it's more than you're willing to risk being stolen. And always run an anti-virus, of course.

Confused. I'm new to all this and I have no idea who to trust to convert my hard earned £ into bitcoins

If all you want to do is convert and not trade regularly, you have pretty much nothing to fear. Transfer funds into Mt. Gox or TradeHill, purchase your bitcoins, and withdraw them to a bitcoin address. Problem solved.

Make sure it's a secure wallet that you put them in though, if it's more than you're willing to risk being stolen. And always run an anti-virus, of course.

Keep in mind the following. If you have any site host (i.e., keep) your BitCoin for you, then there is a chance that they could get hacked. This happened to MtGox. I suggest you keep your own BitCoin.

If you decide to keep your BitCoin, then keep the following in mind. You could get hacked.

If you encrypt your wallet (i.e., your wallet.dat file) and make copies and place them in different places, then you will be safe.There are a lot of posts of how to do this, so browse around. Check out as many as you can to get an ideal. It will boil down to:

Make many copies and place them in different places* and not in the same area (e.g., house or city).Use good encrypting and a strong password.

* An Online site is a place. Make sue that you encrypt your wallet BEFORE you send them your wallet.

I am very glad MtGox is back up. We need more stable exchanges. It appears as though security is tightened and things are business as usual.

My only hope is that a full financial audit is done and there is more transparency.. I kind of feel like I was told there might be WMD's, We found evidence of WMD's, but everything is fine, move along, nothing to see here.

I hope they release the full story of what happened and what was lost, transferred, stolen, and preserved!

Confused. I'm new to all this and I have no idea who to trust to convert my hard earned £ into bitcoins

If all you want to do is convert and not trade regularly, you have pretty much nothing to fear. Transfer funds into Mt. Gox or TradeHill, purchase your bitcoins, and withdraw them to a bitcoin address. Problem solved.

Make sure it's a secure wallet that you put them in though, if it's more than you're willing to risk being stolen. And always run an anti-virus, of course.

Keep in mind the following. If you have any site host (i.e., keep) your BitCoin for you, then there is a chance that they could get hacked. This happened to MtGox. I suggest you keep your own BitCoin.

If you decide to keep your BitCoin, then keep the following in mind. You could get hacked.

If you encrypt your wallet (i.e., your wallet.dat file) and make copies and place them in different places, then you will be safe.There are a lot of posts of how to do this, so browse around. Check out as many as you can to get an ideal. It will boil down to:

Make many copies and place them in different places* and not in the same area (e.g., house or city).Use good encrypting and a strong password.

* An Online site is a place. Make sue that you encrypt your wallet BEFORE you send them your wallet.

So what we see here is you trying to patronize me, by essentially repeating the exact same thing I just said.

Which is good, but you should look to diversify and trade in multiple exchanges in case something happens again like the Mt. Gox scenario. I would suggest Bitcoin7 and even Mt. Gox as things seem to be working well again now.

If you're looking to sign up for an exchange try Bitcoin7 or Tradehill, referral codes are listed below. Sign up for Tradehill and get 10% off of every trade you ever make.

dont you think the volume is too low today? i thought it gonna be quite big...

Well, the MtGox people were throttling for a while, and may still be doing so. Also, given *how long* it took them to come back, many big traders may still not have noticed that they *are* back. So I think it'll return to normalcy in a few days.

I'm really new to the whole digital commodity/currency concept; I was introduced to the notion from a tweet about the Kevin guy who bought a bunch of coins as the price dropped. I'm new and I've only been reading the forums for days following the big crash (although pretty intensively) so I'll keep it brief.

I get the sense that people are staying with Mt.Gox because they've invested time and energy into using it, and they consider it a valuable service that Bitcoins can't really afford to lose.

I get the impression that there are no other really attractive options that would make people switch. Just like YouTube in 2008, when they started to suck hardcore nobody would leave for LiveVideo because they'd already invested time building their videos and their community. So when YouTube gave the community the finger and make life hard, they stayed anyway. That's the way I see it here, there's money on the line, people have familiarity, and there's enough people who happily do business with sharks because they have the skills and it's profitable.

While seeing the exchange empty out would have given me a little bit of sick satisfaction that the poophead running things got his payback for his bad attitude, it would have meant a lot of people losing a lot of value and I wouldn't have wanted to see that. So I'm glad it's still running.